Theo de Raadt wrote about the Intel Core 2 Duo chip: "Various developers are busy implementing workarounds for serious bugs in Intel's Core 2 cpu. These processors are buggy as hell, and some of these bugs don't just cause development/debugging problems, but will assuredly be exploitable from userland code." Intel has given a response to the concerns as well.

Odd - I would have thought the Core 2's were fully capable of having microcode updates to patch around these issues and/or fix some of the errors, at least that's what Intel usually does in situations like these.

The Geeks.com list claims Intel has committed to fixing one of them... But really, how much does microcode control how the processor behaves? If this is faulty wiring, won't it have to wait until they update the product line (or something... new codenames seem to go with updates on features, not debugging)

Quite a bit, however usually Intel expects compiler coders to generate the correct code to avoid/work around the issue. Intel would probably generate a microcode patch to fix any show stopping bugs or serious userland exploits (ie, run dodgy code, get to ring 0/kernel mode) however probably at a cost of execution time or other drawbacks.

Ultimately this means at some point it's probably easier to run hypervisor code that knows the bugs, then virtualises the software/OS completely to scan and fix/detect any code that is bad and eliminates it before it can actually run on the CPU. While they're at it, they can probably optimise/tune the code for performance on the targetted CPU instead.